Macaulay Culkin Asserts, Again, That Michael Jackson 'Never Did Anything to Me'

Macaulay Culkin is standing by his previous claims that Michael Jackson never sexually abused him as a child.

In a revealing new cover profile for Esquire, the 39-year-old actor discusses his bond with the late King of Pop and the longtime rumors that he may be among those allegedly molested by Jackson.

“Look, I’m gonna begin with the line — it’s not a line, it’s the truth: He never did anything to me,” Culkin told the magazine of his time spent with Jackson when he was a child star and the musician was in his 30s. “I never saw him do anything. And especially at this flash point in time, I’d have no reason to hold anything back. The guy has passed on.”

“If anything — I’m not gonna say it would be stylish or anything like that, but right now is a good time to speak up,” the former child actor continued. “And if I had something to speak up about, I would totally do it. But no, I never saw anything; he never did anything.”

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The last time he and Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50 due to cardiac arrest, saw each other was in 2005, during the People v. Michael Jackson trial in which the latter was eventually found not guilty.

But their connection still follows Culkin to this day, even leading to questions from fellow celebrities. After the bombshell documentary Leaving Neverland was released, he told Esquire, he encountered James Franco on a plane, who asked him his feelings on it.

“I give him a little nod as we’re putting our bags overhead. ‘Hey, how you doing?’ ‘Good, how ya doing?’ And it was right after the Leaving Neverland documentary came out, and he goes, ‘So, that documentary!’ ” Culkin recalled. “And that was all he said. I was like, ‘Uh-huh.’ Silence.”

“So then he goes, ‘So what do you think?’ And I turned to him and I go, ‘Do you wanna talk about your dead friend?’ And he sheepishly went, ‘No, I don’t,’ ” he continued. “So I said, ‘Cool, man, it was nice to see you.’ ”

RELATED VIDEO: Macaulay Culkin Says His Friendship with Michael Jackson as a Child Was “Normal” and “Made Sense”

Jackson and Culkin met and became close in the early ’90s, following the latter’s breakout success in 1990’s Home Alone. At the time, Culkin’s fame isolated him from his schoolmates, he said. Jackson was one of the few people who knew what Culkin was going through and, according to Culkin, ultimately wanted to protect him.

“He reached out to me because a lot of things were happening, big and fast with me. I think he identified with that,” the actor said during an appearance on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast in January 2019.

“I was a peerless person,” Culkin continued. “Nobody else in my Catholic school had even this much idea of what I was going through and he was the kind of person who’d been through the exact same frickin’ thing and wanted to make sure I wasn’t alone in that.”

Said the My Girl actor on the podcast, “At the end of the day, it’s almost easy to say it was weird or whatever, but it wasn’t because it made sense. At the end of the day, we were friends.”

Culkin is also godfather to Jackson’s three children, including Paris — with whom he has a matching tattoo, of spoons. It’s his only ink, and as he told Esquire, his “spoons of advice” for the model are, “Don’t forget to be silly, don’t forget to take something away from this whole experience and don’t forget to stick something up your sleeve.”

In August 2018, the 21-year-old celebrated Culkin’s birthday with a sweet message on Instagram. “Happiest of birthdays mack attack,” Paris wrote. “[I] love you so so dearly and keep you very close to my heart. always.”

Culkin stayed decidedly mum about his friendship with Paris during a January 2018 interview on Marc Maron‘s WTF podcast. “I am close with Paris,” he started. “I’m going to warn you now, I am very protective of her, so just look out. I am a very open book when it comes to things, but like with her, she is beloved by me.”

Calling Paris “tall and beautiful and smart,” he added, “I’m just letting you know if we want to start going down that road it’s going to be a dead-end, you know, but I mean that in the fact that I love her so much.”